The Kavli Prize symposium in astrophysics

About the lecturers
Ignar Snellen is a professor in observational astrophysics at Leiden University and currently Scientific Director of Leiden Observatory. Snellen received his PhD from Leiden University, and returned to his alma mater after positions at the University of Cambridge and Edinburgh in the UK. His research focuses on the development of new techniques and ground-based instrumentation for the characterisation of extrasolar planets. In 2022 he was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic honour in the Netherlands. 

Jonathan Fortney is a Professor and the Department Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is an expert in the atmospheres and interiors of planets in the solar system and exoplanets around other stars. He is a former member of NASA's Cassini Mission science team, which transformed our understanding of Saturn, as well as a member of NASA's Kepler Mission science team, which found over 3000 exoplanets. Fortney predominantly works on pioneering theoretical models of the physics and chemistry of planets and has won numerous awards for his work, including from the American Astronomical Society and the Simons Foundation. Much of his current work involves working to understand observations of exoplanet atmospheres with the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope.

Malena Rice is an Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Astronomy. Her research centers on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, spanning topics including exoplanets, stars, and the outer solar system. She received her B.A. degrees in Physics and Astrophysics at UC Berkeley in 2017 before completing her Ph.D. in Astronomy at Yale University, for which she was awarded the 2022 IAU PhD Prize. Prior to joining Yale’s faculty, she spent one year at the MIT Kavli Institute as a Heising-Simons 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow. Malena holds leadership roles in support of the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) missions, and she is an Executive Committee Member for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG). She has authored over 75 academic publications, and she has been named as a Scialog Fellow, a Rising Talent by the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society, and a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. 

Jackie Faherty is a senior research scientist and senior education manager at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Her research group entitled “Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC)” is at the forefront of low mass star, brown dwarf and giant exoplanet characterization studies. She is also co-founder of the successful citizen science project called “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” which has involved over 150,000 volunteers in searches for previously missed cold components of the nearby solar neighborhood. In her unique position at AMNH, Faherty strives to create more opportunities for underrepresented minorities to enter STEM through unique outreach endeavors. 

Diana Powell studies the nature of extrasolar planets and how they form and evolve. Her work spans a variety of topics, including protoplanetary disks, planet formation, and planetary atmospheres. She is particularly interested in using the detailed evolution of small particles to interpret observational data and understand planetary evolution. Powell received her BA in astrophysics and physics from Harvard University, and her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before starting as a professor at the University of Chicago, she was a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Stephanie Werner is Co-Director of the Centre for Planetary Habitability and Professor for Geophysics and Planetary Sciences at the Department for Geosciences, University of Oslo. Her prime research interests comprise comparative planetology, planetary dynamics, exoplanet systems, planetary and geophysics.